Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
magnitude), but in doing so it had to transform typical diets. The most obvious
component of this change was the consumption of meat: not all foraging societies
were highly carnivorous (and in the case of maritime cultures, animal protein came
overwhelmingly from i sh and shelli sh), but without a doubt, the diet of megafaunal
hunters of the late Paleolithic contained much more meat than the diet of the i rst
Neolithic cultivators who planted legumes and cereals and supplemented their diet
with regular hunting. In turn, those diets contained more meat than did the typical
diets of peasants in medieval or early modern societies. As a result, the average
quality of nutrition was generally lower among traditional cultivators than among
the foragers with access to plenty of animals because meat is not only a convenient
source of high-quality, easily digestible protein, it is also an excellent source of
vitamins A, B
12
, D, and iron and zinc.
The consequences of this shift are well coni rmed by anthropometric studies that
show diminished statures of sedentary populations when compared with their forag-
ing predecessors (Kiple 2000). While there are no reliable data that would allow us
to calculate representative regional or national averages of actual meat consumption
during antiquity or the centuries of premodern agricultural intensii cation, the best
generalizations would be as follows: even in the relatively well-off societies, average
per capita meat intakes were mostly just 5-10 kg/year, and in most subsistence
peasant societies meat consumption was minimal, as small quantities were eaten
only once a week, with more consumed only on a few festive occasions.
And these low intakes did not rise even during the early modern period because
more pastures were converted into arable land in order to feed larger populations.
In addition, intensii cation of farming made bovines more valuable as prime movers
(for both i eld work and transport) and sources of manure, and as a result, milk
and cheese rather than meat were the most commonly consumed animal foods.
During the early 1790s the meat consumption of poor English and Welsh rural
laborers was only about 8 kg/year (Clark, Huberman, and Lindert 1995). In France,
large numbers of peasants ate meat only at Easter and at weddings; Toutain (1971)
calculated that meat intake supplied less than 3% of all food energy in 1800.
In the most densely populated regions of premodern Asia a very similar situation
persisted well into the twentieth century. Japan represented the most extreme case,
with its Buddhism-inspired imperial bans on meat eating going back originally to
the seventh century and renewed repeatedly on many occasions afterward. Meat
intakes averaged still less than 2 kg/year during the seventeenth century (Ishige
2001), and Buck's (1930) data for the early 1920s show the range of Chinese annual
intakes between less than 0.3 kg/year in Hebei and 5 kg/capita in Jiangsu, with a
